Author Archives: Greg Wallace

Following through on our renewed focus on diversity, education and accessibility that we announced over the summer, the jQuery Foundation has in the past couple of months hosted one event and sponsored another devoted to increasing diversity in tech through outreach and education.

This free three-day event, which was generously hosted by Digital Ocean, was designed to make open source development more accessible to, and inclusive of, members of underrepresented groups in technology. Participants of all skill levels and disciplines learned best practices and essential skills from current open source contributors and project representatives, and made contributions to an open source project that interests them.

The event heralded several firsts:

the first jQuery Developer Summit in three years

the first jQuery Foundation event in New York City

the first time we’ve been able to run an event that’s free to participants

the first time we’re working with partners to focus on improving the representation of diverse communities in open source

the first event that brought together project leads from both the jQuery Foundation and Dojo Foundation after our recent merge of these organizations

In creating this event, the jQuery Foundation sought to remove as many barriers as possible to attending a tech event and getting involved in open source. To achieve our aim, we scheduled the event on a weekend to avoid work conflicts, made it free to all attendees to remove income barriers, kept the size small to ensure a low mentor:attendee ratio, partnered with local organizations for underrepresented groups, and followed the jQuery Foundation Code of Conduct. Our efforts paid off, making this event a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.

The Agenda

Friday night we had a nice meet and greet with food and drink. Mentors helped get everyone’s laptop set up with all the software they’d need to hit the ground running Saturday morning.

Saturday began with a series of introductory presentations by experienced developers and in many cases leaders of jQuery Foundation and other Open Source projects. The intent was to orient new attendees to the why, how and what of contributing to Open Source projects.

Why Contribute?

Anne-Gaelle Colom, Content Lead for the jQuery Foundation and Teaching Fellow at University of Westminster shared how she first got involved with mobile programming in 1996, and how her eventual involvement in jQuery projects helped her gain recognition and status as a woman in a male-dominated profession and University department. Find her presentation here.

Additional presentations, which ran during the morning on Saturday and Sunday, covered all the basics one needs to understand in order to get started contributing to Open Source. The speakers and content were really great. Where possible, the slide links are included below.

Results

Several attendees responded to our post-event survey. Here’s some of the feedback:

The Summit benefitted me in so many ways. I really valued the proportion of mentors to mentees. It was great to have so many experts floating around to be able to spend one on one time with you wherever you might have been in your path. I liked the casual flexibility of it all.

I think you did an awesome job of getting a variety of people to attend.I am really glad that you included the LGBTQ community. I have NEVER EVER seen such diversity at any other event or conference I have ever attended in my 21 years in tech.

The most valuable aspect was contributing to open source. The summit made me realize that open source is more than just code.

We also asked mentors for their thoughts:

The almost 1-on-1 ratio of speakers/mentors to attendees made this event so intimate and gave me the opportunity to really meet people and find out about them, what their interests were and how they could benefit open source and how open source could benefit their life.

The enthusiasm of the attendees and their desire to get involved was amazing! It’s obvious that so many people just don’t get involved in open source because they can’t get past the on-boarding and that is somewhere we can definitely help!

Mozilla View Source

November 2-4, the jQuery Foundation sponsored the Diversity in Tech Corner at Mozilla’s View Source event in Portland, OR.

The goal of View Source was to provide an in-depth, practical look at current and on-the-horizon technologies, with plenty of opportunities for conversation.

Caterina Paun, Director of the Portland Women Who Code network greeted attendees in the Diversity in Tech Corner and led discussions about women in the engineering workforce, how to join an all-male team as a woman, and how companies can support the careers of women.

While there is undoubtedly much work yet to be done to make the collective of web builders as diverse as the web’s consumers, judging by the Twitter conversations, this event at least served as a beacon for inclusiveness.

Once in a while I lose my way in terms of what I do and what I want as a web developer. Conferences like @viewsourceconf help me refocus.
— Alicia Sedlock (@aliciability) November 4, 2015

With day 1 complete, I must say, the most striking part about the day was the amount of smart women who took the stage. @viewsourceconf
— Elaine Oliver (@evoliver) November 3, 2015

Next Up for the jQuery Foundation

We still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do but as we continue to execute on our goal to increase diversity in open source, keep an eye out for announcements of future event sponsorships, speaking engagements and developer summits going into 2016!

Tell us about your organization

Our openHTML group at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA researches how people learn about computation through the web, and ways we can design tools to support these learning experiences. Snowball is our latest project for giving people a way to express themselves using the web as a medium.

What is Snowball and how does it help advance the Open Web?

Snowball is a WordPress plugin that makes it possible for anyone to create modern, immersive, interactive articles to tell their stories on the web. Our goal is to make it possible for everyone including bloggers, students, and journalists to create engaging articles like the ones produced by world-class news organizations.

We provide a graphical interface where you can start building the content of your article block by block. Within each block, you can tinker with the widgets to add your own content and style. Each block also has a coding interface so you can inspect the underlying HTML and CSS, and add a dash of your own to customize even further. We provide blocks ranging from third-party media embeds to interactive visualizations.

What are the benefits of including jQuery as a dependency in Snowball?

jQuery ensures that we can provide a uniform experience across a broad range of devices and platforms, freeing our time to spend on what makes our project unique.

How do jQuery projects help Snowball and its users achieve your and their goals?

jQuery has accelerated the pace of our development, allowing us to build a functional prototype in less than two months. In turn, this has allowed us to start getting feedback, and iterating on our design, sooner rather than later.

What’s coming next in Snowball?

We’re partnering with The Triangle, Drexel University’s student-run newspaper, to pilot Snowball for long-form articles. This will teach us a great deal about how journalists work the web and how we can make our tool more useful for them. We’re also in the process of getting Snowball listed on WordPress.org’s plugin directory so that it’s available to everyone.

How can people get involved?

If any news organization or educators are interested in trying Snowball, we’d love to partner with you. We’re also open source and on GitHub. If you know HTML, CSS, and jQuery, you know enough to contribute new block types in Snowball!

Are you involved with an amazing site or app that uses a jQuery Foundation project or projects? Check out the Web Excellence Program categories and submit yours today! Entries in all categories are heartily welcomed, and we’d love to hear how individual developers all the way to Enterprises use jQuery Foundation projects to achieve their business and technology goals.

In June, the jQuery Foundation Board of Directors held an in-person meeting, hosted by Famous in their San Francisco offices. During the meeting, the Board agreed to the following priorities to fulfill the Foundation’s Mission of improving the open web, making it accessible for everyone, through the development and support of open source software, and collaboration with the development community.

Our priorities are:

Diversity: Open source depends on contributions. An organization’s vitality can be destroyed by having a closed group that excludes or even actively antagonizes newcomers. There is incredible value in having a diverse set of contributors with different cultures, backgrounds, perspectives, and skill sets. The jQuery Foundation is committed to improving diversity at all levels, from the development community in general to the projects we host and all the way to our own board, which we acknowledge isn’t very diverse today.

Accessibility: As with diversity, this goal is again in the spirit of inclusiveness. Web technology has many features to make it friendly to users with sight, motor, or cognitive issues. Many web developers don’t know about them, or defeat them without realizing the implications. We want to change that. Last month’s jQuery SF conference had several excellent speakers who showed what the web can be like for some users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWzEF1P-bvI#t=7h34m30s

Education: This goal crosses all of our priorities and encompasses many different subjects. By educating developers, both on the world of open source and also on the issues of diversity and accessibility, we can make the web an inclusive place.

We will achieve these goals by focusing our efforts on three key areas:

Actively Recruiting New Projects: As you can tell, the jQuery Foundation’s mission goes far beyond the original jQuery projects. We are looking to host projects that we can help. The Foundation offers projects greater visibility, a voice in the standards process, help in managing their community, infrastructure such as a CDN, and other benefits. Projects remain autonomous, the Foundation doesn’t dictate the project’s goals or roadmap. We can, however, offer financial support for meeting mutually agreed upon project goals.

Defining and Delivering Essential (basic through advanced) Web Developer Education: We want to help developers learn how to contribute to open source projects, how to run open source projects, and how to build web sites or applications that apply best practices and beyond that, we want to educate developers on the importance and implementation of diversity and accessibility in their projects. Finally, we want to get the word out about how the jQuery Foundation can help developers do their jobs better.

Growing Our Impact through Outreach: The jQuery Foundation can only accomplish its goals with the support of companies and individuals who believe in the mission. If you or your company is interested in joining us to improve the web development community, please get in touch info@jquery.org. Like the open source projects we host, the jQuery Foundation itself is powered by memberships, volunteers and donations! Those of you who have already contributed, we thank you for supporting the mission.

Powering 2/3 of sites, jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library

Since last December’s release, the team has been hard at work on a major 3.0 release. This release – the alpha of which came out on July 8 – comes with many updates (including Promises/A+ compliant Deferreds) and bug fixes, and it finally removes some previously deprecated and underused features.

JavaScript library for internationalization and localization that leverages the official Unicode CLDR JSON data.

Globalize version 1.0 was released in April and provides developers with localized number formatting and parsing, date and time formatting and parsing, relative time formatting, currency formatting, and message formatting (with pluralization and gender support) that runs in browsers and Node.js, consistently across all of them.

One exciting thing the community is focused on is the ability to compile Globalize for production. This will enable applications to generate custom runtime code that is extremely small and fast.

High performance, standard-compliant ECMAScript parser written in JavaScript

In March, we released Esprima 2.1.0, introducing support for several new pieces of ES6 syntax. In the mean time, a lot of work has been done to complete its ES6 support (check the roadmap). We’ve also improved the testing infrastructure and workflow to make the codebase more contributor-friendly.

The latest release, 1.18.0, made a lot of improvements to the HTML reporter, making it more efficient to debug failures. For example, a new diff algorithm makes it easier to spot the difference in failed expected/actual assertions.

We’re currently working on the js-reporters project, which QUnit will implement, along with hopefully many other JavaScript testing frameworks and tools. The goal is to standardize an API with events and event data for test runners. A tool like Karma could then adopt a single interface instead of having to support each testing tool individually.

Submit Your Project for the jQuery Foundation Web Excellence Program

The jQuery Foundation wants to tell the world about all the incredible things developers are doing with jQuery Foundation projects. That’s why we are launching the jQuery Foundation Web Excellence program.

Here’s how it works:

You pick the category or categories in which you want to submit (See category descriptions below)

Tell us about you, your company/project, and how jQuery Foundation projects help you make it happen

We’ll highlight projects on the jQuery Blog and promote them on social media

Category Descriptions

All Around Rock Star: This category highlights the sites/apps that leverage any jQuery Foundation project to produce a stellar digital experience. Please highlight your approach to leveraging jQuery Foundation tools, libraries and resources, stand-alone or in combination with other Open Web components and frameworks to solve real problems and delight users.

Mobile Masterpiece: This category highlights the sites/apps that use any jQuery Foundation project to engage consistently with users across all devices, including mobile.

Enterprise: Highlights the organizations leveraging any jQuery Foundation project to help their enterprise organization (5,000 and up employees) achieve strategic IT and/or business objectives (e.g. system integration, uptime, compatibility/accessibility, revenue, cost reduction).

Top Speed: Highlights the organizations that use any jQuery Foundation project as part of a rapid project/product launch and/or to achieve fast site/app performance. Do your users have a need for speed that jQuery Foundation projects help you deliver? Tell us about it!

Globetrotter: Showcases the sites, apps, systems or projects that best demonstrate the power of Globalize when implemented stand-alone or in combination with other jQuery Foundation projects.

Powered by jQuery: Showcases the SDKs and other toolsets that leverage any jQuery Foundation project as a dependency.